


My Life Is Over Who?

by ProtoNeoRomantic



Series: Patch Works [36]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: "It's a little too late to do the right thing now.", Adulthood, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Bad Parenting, Catch 22, Childhood Friends, Choices, Consequences, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Irony, Lies, Love, Loyalty, Marriage, Minor Character Death, Multiple Relationships, Paradox, Regret, Responsibility, Square Boned, Teen Pregnancy, The Circle of Life, Truth, Twice the Fool it takes, life sucks, lose/lose, manhood, omissions, soon and for the rest of your life, swell on paper, we were on a break
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-22
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-19 01:32:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3591327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When things get complicated with Willow and Cordelia, Xander's parents try to talk to him about it.  This should go well(!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Life Is Over Who?

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Whose Line is it Anyway?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3120551) by [ProtoNeoRomantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic). 



“Xander?” his mom sounded worried, surprised. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d go to Willow’s after... Is the funeral even over?”

“Yeah,” said Xander, looking at his shoes. He sounded shaken. “They’re doing the Shiva thing in Elmwood, though, at her uncle’s house.” The look in his eyes! Jessica was shocked. She never would have expected Sheila’s death to affect him this badly except for the fact that it was hurting Willow, but if that was what had him so upset, he’d be there, wherever there was.

Xander sat down at the kitchen table and buried his face in his hands, sick with dread, near panic. There was no way to deal with this situation that worked in any sense. For anybody. He’d promised to marry Cordelia. He couldn’t marry Cordelia. To marry Cordelia, he’d have to dump Willow. With a kid. He could _not_ do _that_ to _her_. If any other guy did _that_ to _her.._. it wouldn’t hurt her half as bad. To get dumped, with a kid, by your so called best friend, for _Cordelia_! She might just curl in a ball and die. Or she might decide to take him and half the town with her. And even if she didn’t, before it was all over with, Cordelia probably would. Or her father. Or Buffy.

“Honey just tell me what’s wrong,” his mom said, sounding impatient, the way she always claimed she never meant to. Xander couldn't answer her. His thoughts were still too tangled. Truthfully, he felt like he should offer to marry Willow. He couldn’t marry Willow. See above re Cordelia and/or her father. Also, he wasn’t sure he _wanted_ to be married to Willow. All he could think of when he thought of it was a big, huge, scary FOREVER, which was not actually any less true or any less scary if it was Cordelia instead, which made him not sure he wanted to be married to her either, or anybody else. Somehow, that FOREVER just hadn’t felt as real until he’d pictured Willow in it. But it was. And it seemed like there was no way out of it, one way or the other. What else could he do? Break up with both of them and make a town full of enemies with absolutely no friends at all? Plus see above re ripped out still-beating heart of Willow.

“It can't be that bad,” Jessica insisted, starting to sound really annoyed, disappointed in her overly dramatic child.

Xander emitted a tiny, hollow particle of a laugh. Her frowned deepened. He wasn't getting away with not answering. “You remember when I was nine and you told me Willow wasn’t allowed to sleep in my bedroom anymore when she came over because ‘who knows what might happen’?” Xannder ventured at last.

Jessica couldn’t help feeling a little cross, and not just because, as always, it was like pulling teeth to get him to tell her anything. “I remember,” she said, “you made fun of me over that for years.”

“Yeah, well, you were right and I was wrong. And I’ve been getting a lot wronger lately.”

“Xander,” she admonished, sitting down at the table next to him, “You don’t have to make a knock-knock joke out of it, just tell me what’s wrong.” Her voice was exasperated but her eyes were very worried.

Xander buried his face in his hands again, shaking his head. He laughed, but the laugh was a sad, anemic thing. “No, no,” he said. “Actually it makes a great joke. Hilarious. Knock-knock. Who’s there? My life’s over. My life’s over who? If I knew that—!”

The answer hit her like a ton of unfired bricks. “Oh my God, she’s pregnant, isn’t she?!”Jessica cried, “You got that poor nice girl pregnant!”

“What? N—Well yeah, okay I did, but you don’t have to make it sound—Oh God, Mom, I’m in so much trouble! I don’t know what to do.”

“How pregnant is she?” Jessica asked with grim significance, although she’d always said before it shouldn’t make a difference.

“I don’t—four or—almost five months I guess?” Xander said.

Jessica nodded, acknowledging both a past and a future. “I thought she was acting strange that day she came over here, right after you broke up with that horrible Chase girl the first time.” Xander remained absolutely silent. “Well,” Jessica mused, “at least it wasn’t _her_ that got pregnant.” Xander’s silence somehow got a lot quieter. He did not look up. For several seconds in fact, he didn’t move a muscle. He might have been a video on ‘pause.’ _My life is over who?_

“Alexander Lavelle Harris,” Jessica said in her sternest, most parental voice, “look at me.”

“I don’t want to,” he mumbled with a kind of pouty, defeated defiance she hadn’t heard since he was four or five years old.

Jessica sighed. “I should have known something like this would happen,” she simultaneously fretted and censured, standing up and _almost_ pacing, hovering over him, wringing her hands. “You’re father always encouraged you to be irresponsible! Him and his slobbering drunk brother! He says I worry too much, well—!”

“Ma!” Xander cut her off, a little more sharply than he meant to, not wanting to hear her run on about his dad the way she always did. “Don’t—It’s not—I just have to figure it all out, that’s all.”

“What are you going to figure out?” Jessica challenged morosely, wringing her hands more than ever.

“Boy do I don’t know!” Xander admitted tensely. There was an unprecedented stretch of silence between the two of them. It must have lasted ten or eleven seconds. “Hey,” Xander tried to joke, finally looking up, “You don’t happen to know if the circus is in town?”

“That’s not funny,” Jessica scolded. “How pregnant is the other one?”

“Four and a half months.”

“ _Xander_ ,” his mother fretted disapprovingly.

“What?” he countered, “two or three months apart would have somehow been better?”

Jessica couldn’t bring herself to say why it could be. “And you’re sure...” she said instead, “you’re _absolutely_ sure...?” but she couldn’t bring herself to ask that either. She turned away and finally started pacing for real, still wringing her hands.

“Yeah,” he assured her, “I am. They wouldn’t lie to me.” He was stabbed in the heart by irony, though technically, he hadn’t lied to either of them. Yet.

A dry sob burst from Jessica. “Tony!” she called suddenly, her tone a whine of equal parts petulance and distress.

“No, Ma—” Xander began to protest frantically. She ignored him.

“Tony, come talk to your son!”

Xander let his head drop forward until his forehead banged again the top of the table both too hard and not hard enough. He let it lay there a minute while his parents shouted an argument from room to room about whether whatever Jessica wanted could wait until a commercial break. They kept on like that. Jessica made dire hints but didn’t _say_ anything. Tony held out. Xander got up and got himself a snack out of the fridge. He took his time, making a triple bologna sandwich with three slices each of garlicky lunch meat and pasteurized, processed cheese food, to fortify himself for the coming interrogation.

But when Tony finally arrived, grudgingly prepared to spare them four minutes of prime time, he was not quite sober nor quite drunk. If he’d have been either, he’d have been pissed. As it was, he thought the whole thing was funny. “Congratulations!” he laughed, slapping Xander on the back, “you’re a man before your mother!”

“Tony!” Jessica scolded, “for God’s sake, what are we going to do!”

“Well, whatever you do, don’t get married,” he advised Xander, making a point of ignoring his wife while responding to her cues at the same time. “It’ll only make things worse. Your mother and I never should have gotten married. She should have told me before she was that kind of Catholic.”

“Oh Tony, for the love of God!”she wailed, bursting into tears.

“And no matter what, don’t try to marry both of them!” Tony rattled on, laying an unwanted hand on his son’s shoulder. “My great-great grandfather was scalped by Mormons!” Uproarious laughter followed. Only from Tony, of course.

“Thanks, Dad,” said Xander with bleak irony, shrugging off his father’s hand and stepping around him, towards the basement stairs. “Glad we talked. This has helped. I’m gonna go down stairs.”

 


End file.
